Evaluating designers is tough. One of the challenges in the client-company relationship is that the client often lacks the expertise in a particular area to judge the work that they are getting.
How is a client to know when something is part of a normal, professional process and when it’s *not good?*
This article will help with exactly that process.
Even when you’re not a designer.
Choices: Part of Your Creative Process
First- you have to allow for choices that aren’t working. Part of the process.
A lot of times, we’ll float an idea to a client that will include choices that don’t wind up working. Sometimes it will be a color scheme, other times a metaphor that doesn’t quite land (or is in use in their industry).
This is different than low quality work. Seeing a choice in play visually is often necessary as part of the process.
These choices are what you pay for when you hire a design company. And if your production company is any good at all, you’ll see a few looks that may not wind up working when you do this.
Choices that don’t work aren’t usually a mistake. Edison famously went through hundreds of filament combinations before he found the lightbulb that worked. Are things that happened on the path to the lightbulb mistakes, or part of the process?
And, how do you tell the difference between a choice that isn’t working and an error?
Errors: Never Necessary!
Errors aren’t necessary.
They come in many types and flavors. They are *different* than bad choices. Errors are a lack of follow through, professionalism, or completeness in work that’s being presented. We’ll address a few:
Ignoring The Brief
The most basic type of error (that is the big difference between hobbyists and professionals) is ignoring the brief. This would be a situation like using kinetic type when it’s not allowed, using an art style that has been eliminated, or using a script type that isn’t part of the role.
Ignoring the brief is a huge problem because it wastes the energy of the client. It’s easily preventable: read a brief, if the brief is unclear, ask for clarity. In lieu of working towards the improvement of a project, they spend time repeating themselves and using energy trying to get what they originally had expected.
Quality Control
Typos. Sound drops. Rendering Artifacts. Resolution issues. These are all QC issues that should rarely be shown to clients. (Exceptions: in early drafts).
A lot of times these things are hard to see when you’re working on a project (I often don’t catch my own typos) so a second set of eyes is helpful. Still – a client’s job isn’t to QC their provider’s work.
Consistency
Consistency is the mark of a well thought out process. Even when choices are not correct, having consistency in design elements and ideas indicates higher quality thought.
Inconsistency is a subset of errors, and gets special attention (and it’s very own sub header). The problem with inconsistency is that it generally comes with indifference. Other times it’s because the team you work with has multiple people and they haven’t reconciled their versions.
In any case, this is a huge signal of low quality work. Here are some ideas a non-designer can use to check for consistency:
What fonts are we using? Are they generally the same? If not, is it on purpose?
What stroke widths do we use? Are they the same when with most shots?
Which color palette is in effect? Is it deliberate, consistent?
Are we making choices in our compositions? Is the work we’re doing framed correctly, and deliberately?
When Inconsistency is OK. Sometimes we “have to see it” and we will get a draft out with two different looks in two different sections. We may have a different color scheme or different color palette just to see how things are working.
Sometimes that sort of thing needs to be finessed.
How to Identify Quality
It’s not just the absence of errors in your work. It’s more than that.
We are looking for:
- interesting designs
- thorough work
- consistent choices
- few typos
- adherence to the brief and client style guide
- contemporary look (i.e. We’d probably not use a ton of skeumorphic ideas in 2016)
These ideas are necessary (but not always sufficient) components of quality work. And this is what any client should expect from any provider representing themselves as a quality organization.
What To Do When You HAVE To see Something?
Ok, so all of this being said, sometimes you’re in a hurry. A deadline is part of the project, and you have to move forward and show progress to make stakeholders happy.
If four people are all working on different scenes, it will take sometimes unrealistically tight coordination to make everything consistent on the first pass.
So, what has to happen before the client sees it is that they have to know what they are looking at. Your provider should explain what’s going on and what you’re looking at.
We’d present this by saying “Hey here’s the work in progress. We have some issues – like the typos – but rather than make you wait, we wanted to get some feedback.”